OpenStack Havana

OpenStack Havana, the eighth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, has nearly 400 new features to support software development, managing data and application infrastructure at scale. The OpenStack community continues to attract the best developers and experts in their disciplines with 910 individuals employed by 145 different organizations contributing to the Havana release.

Havana Dashboard Screenshots

Launch Instance

Resource Usage Overview

UX & Interface Improvements

Instance Management

Orchestration Templates

Orchestration Configuration

New Features in Havana

OpenStack Havana provides infrastructure that makes it easier to build and deploy applications with OpenStack clouds. New services like OpenStack Metering and Orchestration, coupled with enhancements to existing services like global clusters for Object Storage and QoS capabilities for Block Storage make it ideal for organizations building cloud infrastructure to serve software development, data management and application infrastructure at scale.

OpenStack Compute

Compute delivers instance shelving to conserve resource usage, exposes PCI devices directly to the instances and improvements to “Cells” for managing large-scale clouds and distributed clusters. Support was added for Docker, a new driver gaining popularity in the community used to speed application deployment with containers. Additionally, more Compute features are now exposed for users via the OpenStack Dashboard.

OpenStack Object Storage

A major new addition to Object Storage in the Havana release is the Global Clusters capability, which enables you to cut costs and improve performance by replicating and delivering data around the world. There were additional performance improvements to optimize disk operations and internal caching mechanisms, and ConfD support was added to better manage configurations.

OpenStack Block Storage

The Block Storage service offers many new features to manage volumes, including the ability to extend volume size, update quotas, transfer volume ownership and migrate volumes from one backend to another depending on performance requirements. The new QoS capability across Block Storage drivers allows you to guarantee performance requirements for an application.

OpenStack Networking

The Networking service offers new VPN-as-a-service and Firewall-as-a-service capabilities, both of which are exposed in the Dashboard. It is now easier for hardware vendors to write plugins for the modular Layer 2 networking architecture. The Networking service has also been integrated with the new Metering service, making it easier for public and private cloud billing.

OpenStack Dashboard

OpenStack Dashboard brings an improved user experience, greater multilingual support, and exposes new features across OpenStack clouds like Orchestration and Metering. A new team of user experience experts contributed their time to improve the UI, workflows and productivity. It's easier to visualize network topology, and new VPN and Firewall-as-a-service capabilities are exposed. There is also improved role and password management.

Shared Services

New services in the Havana release include OpenStack Orchestration, a template-driven service for describing and automating deployment of compute, storage and networking resources for an application, and OpenStack Metering, which provides users with a single source of usage data across OpenStack services for activities like enterprise chargebacks and feeding systems monitoring tools. The Image Service now supports quotas and additional storage options. The Identity service is more pluggable, with better separation between authorization and authentication, and more granular RBAC.

List of Contributors

Thank you to the global team of 910 developers who delivered the seventh OpenStack release on time and with every critical feature: